Rants and Raves on Espresso

September 2012

Sometimes life surprises you when what seem like different compartmentalized aspects of it suddenly cross over. Such was the case today where, at one of the more famous technology start-up conferences here in San Francisco, I stumbled across a team building prototype coffeemaking equipment who were performing demonstrations. The company is SF-based Blossom Coffee Inc., and they’re building what they believe is the rightful successor to the Clover brewer — which just a few years back, over the period of several months, essentially entered and left the premium coffee world like a comet.

Does this “TechCrunch” stay crispy in milk?

First: a little background. You see, my “day job” is doing entrepreneurial work to get an education technology start-up off the ground. The coffee thing is largely a rather indulgent hobby with occasional fringe benefits. And the TechCrunch Disrupt conference focuses on technology start-ups with the lofty intent of “disrupting” many of the existing ways of doing business. It’s part wannabe terrorist camp — with targets of economic business models instead of the soft bodies of civilians — and part religious revival — with many attendees trying to prove their worthiness to be a part of, and not subject to, the destruction ahead that leads to salvation within the next “regime”.

Like Blossom Coffee, on Monday I was pitching my start-up on the conference showroom floor. But today (Wednesday) the conference devoted the floor to hardware companies of all kinds.

Attending a conference like this is a bit of a geek fest. Think of all the nerds in school who weren’t cool enough to start bands, so they started companies instead. Despite the thick layer of hubris at events like this, there are typically a few great ideas, many so-so ideas, and the majority are things none of us will probably ever see again in two years. And to peel off any self-important luster even further, you have to remember that building Web sites and mobile apps in SF today is a bit like building cars in Detroit was some 50 years ago.

That said, this year the conference attempted to emphasize both more international start-ups (I never knew so many Brazilian consumer wine Web sites existed) and start-ups featuring hardware products. Hence Blossom Coffee.

Talking with Blossom President, Jeremy Kuempel, we connected over our past experience taking thermodynamics classes in engineering college. Except when Jeremy learned the Ideal gas law equation of PV=nRT, often demonstrated by illustrations of pressurized gas in a piston, Jeremy immediately thought to put coffee in the cylindrical chamber. Pretty cool.

The primary goal of the Blossom Coffee brewer (the “Blossom One Limited”) is to succeed the Clover brewer in its degree of digitally configurable, stable temperature control. With a +/-2% accuracy from 160-212℉, it may not be coffee sous-vide just yet — but it’s getting there. Using two highly functional prototypes with La Marzocco group heads, Jeremy and team were experimenting for passersby at the event with some 16 pounds of coffee from Highwire Coffee Roasters. In addition to demonstrating some of the visual “romance” that’s important to high-end pressurized brewing equipment, Jeremy also hinted at some of the WiFi-enabled digital reading and control features planned for the brewer (recipe downloading, fleet management, etc.).

Alongside the working prototypes at their station was a rather sexy finished casing for the proposed end product, as they currently are only accepting pre-orders. They are initially targeting small, high quality coffee chains of some 5-10 stores each. And the taste in the resulting cup seemed promising.

We’ve seen attempted successors to the Clover brewer before — even from Clover. Now we may love our old school pour-over coffee, but anything that gets us to think once again about moving beyond the 104-year-old practice of manual pour-over brewing in today’s cutesy name of “slow coffee” (blech) is a welcome addition in our books. Traditions are good; having few viable alternatives after over a century is not. That’s not so much “slow coffee” as “inertia coffee.”

Thus we hope to find a Blossom brewer soon at a coffee shop near us.UPDATE: Sept. 29, 2012
Quite a litany of newsfeeds picked up the story of Blossom today with this example bit of press from one of the feeders: What a drip! NASA and Apple alums engineer $11,111 coffee maker | Mail Online. Knowing that reporters are generally clueless about coffee and the prices of espresso machines — and thus they eat dollar-figures up given their lack of any other descriptive adjectives — the quoted $11,111 figure reads like deliberate idiot bait.

If so, these Blossom guys are more clever than we thought; they’ve made an insider’s joke that knows all too well what buttons to push for a news item to propel itself across the Internet via meme theory. Send in the trolls!

Flying under our radar last month was a great cover story on the evolution and pitfalls of a quality local coffee business in Milwaukee Magazine: MilwaukeeMag.com – Coffee Wars.

As in many other mid-market cities across America over the past decade-plus, quality coffee has infiltrated even the most staunch communes of Starbucks drones. The Milwaukee coffee market is no exception, with Alterra Coffee serving as something of Milwaukee’s analogue to Blue Bottle.

But the story of Alterra Coffee could be the story of any pioneering quality coffee purveyor in America: local start-up business makes great coffee and changes local tastes and expectations, business success translates into growth of operations (roasting, retail, and distribution) and ambition, continued growth brings the company to a crossroads when they must answer where continued growth hurts product quality and company values, and the inspiration and spawning of newer, more nimble local competition.

That major crossroads for Alterra came in 2010 when Mars Corporation — the self-proclaimed “world’s leading petcare, chocolate, confection, food & drink company” (from their Web site) — approached them with an offer to include their coffee in Mars’ owned Flavia packets in exchange for revenue sharing and distribution rights.

Some 27 years ago in nearby Minneapolis, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg croaked the words, “Time for decisions to be made: crack up in the sun, or lose it in the shade.” Do you reach for greater distribution and more revenues to expand your mission of good coffee? Or are you diluting your product and your brand, all the while inviting customer criticisms of going too “corporate” and selling out? (As the article quotes the local criticisms: “Alterra is the ‘Microsoft of coffee in Milwaukee’.”)

Like the Facebook status says: it’s complicated. And a cautionary tale worth the read.UPDATE: July 29, 2013
As a result of Alterra’s deal with Mars, and its subsequent break-up, starting Monday they will be now known as Colectivo: Alterra Coffee brewing up a new name: Colectivo. The Alterra name will remain with Mars and whatever coffee-like substances they continue to peddle in hermetically sealed packets. The coffee folks behind Colectivo essentially staged their own death to avoid being associated with whatever filth Mars is now associating with Alterra’s once good name.UPDATE: Aug. 3, 2013
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel came out with a good piece on what Mars actually gets out of the Alterra deal besides a name that the owners even abandoned: Mars banks on Alterra name and symbolism. Mars bought a folksy, local story that a multinational conglomerate can promote — even if it has nothing to do with the products they ship that carry the old Alterra brand name.